Kontact suite is the powerful KDE PIM solution for KDE. Kontact lets you handle email, agenda, contacts and other 'personal' data together in one place. By separating the PIM back end and the interfaces it has become possible to create Kontact Touch and Kontact Desktop and further interfaces could easily be developed

KDE Kontact consists of the Kontact PIM back end and the graphical applications connecting to the back end. Special 'agents' (say a facebook agent) are employed to get new data in and merge it in the existing data set (for example contacts, news). Due to the clean infrastructure new agents are easy to develop.

Kontact supports various groupware servers. When using these servers your workgroup has access to features like shared email folders, group task lists, calendar sharing, central address books and meeting scheduling.

In short: KDE Kontact delivers innovations to help you manage your communications more easily, organize your work faster and work together more closely, resulting in more productivity and efficiency in digital collaboration.

FAQ, Hints and Tips

Migrating your setup to a new distro

In KMail, right click on your Inbox and choose Properties. Go the Maintenance Tab. Have a look at the Location. It has either .kde4 or .kde in the path.

Substitute the appropriate path below.

You need the following config files:

.kde4/share/config/emaildefaults

.kde4/share/config/emailidentities

.kde4/share/config/kmail.eventsrc

.kde4/share/config/kmailrc

.kde4/share/config/kaddressbookrc

.kde4/share/config/kresources/contact

.kde4/share/config/korgacrc

.kde4/share/config/korganizerrc

.kde4/share/config/knotesrc

.kde4/share/config/mailtransports

And the following directories:

.kde4/share/apps/kmail

.kde4/share/apps/kabc

.kde4/share/apps/korganizer

.kde4/share/apps/knotes

If you use Akregator within Kontact, you will also need:

.kde4/share/config/akregator.eventsrc

.kde4/share/config/akregatorrc

And the whole .kde4/share/apps/akregator directory.

Of course the simplest way is just to keep your whole home directory.

Just a word of warning. If the directory naming is different between Desktops or between the two versions of your distro, this will not work as there are references to the directories within the config files. This means that if the files were in a .kde directory, you cannot just put them in a .kde4 directory without editing the references within the config files.

Hiding the Kontact Sidebar

On small screens, you may wish to reclaim the space used by the Kontact sidebar. You can replace it with an (editable) toolbar:

Settings->Toolbars Shown->Navigator [x]

Drag the left panel closed using the splitter between it and the main panel, job done. Don't forget to enable Navigator in every component.

Enabling SOCKS support in KMail and KNode

Unlike KDE 3, KDE 4 does not have built-in SOCKS support yet. However, it is still possible and relatively simple to make KMail and KNode use a SOCKS proxy, by using proxychains or other similar tools like tsocks or socksify. Assuming that proxychains is correctly installed and configured, all you need to do is to open a terminal (e.g. Konsole) and type:

proxychains kdeinit4

You don't even need to restart KMail/KNode! (You need to type the above command every time you start a new KDE session though).